Yuengling IPL

You know when you see those annoying polls or questions that go something like “What beer would you pick if you could only drink one specific beer for the rest of your life”? I hate those questions because for one thing it’s silly and not plausible and the other thing is I don’t want to think about a world where I can only have one kind of beer for the rest of my life. That being said, if I had to choose one beer for the rest of my life, it would be Yuengling Lager. If you don’t know, Yuengling is the oldest brewery in the US, since 1829. When prohibition happened, they kept brewing, they just brewed a “near bear” .5% ABV beer. It’s also a really good, easy drinking Lager that in my neck of the woods you can get just about anywhere for an incredibly reasonable price. Beer snobs can turn their nose up at it and I don’t care. I like it, get over it.

Earlier this year, Yuengling announced that they would be introducing a new beer to the line up, an IPL, or India Pale Lager in the Fall. I could hardly contain my excitement and eagerly awaited the day I’d see one on the shelf so I could test it out. Flash forward to last week and I finally got my hands on a six pack. I also watched the brewer video to get a little more info. This beer is made with their house lager yeast hopped with Belma and Bravo hops and then dry hopped with Cascade and Citra hops. Citra hops are one of my favorite hops and is new to Yuengling.

Once I got it chilled, I didn’t even pour it into a proper drinking vessel because, well, I didn’t feel like it…and it was delicious. However, the “beer blogger” in me knew that in order to really appreciate it, I needed to pour it in a glass to fully appreciate it. You can smell the Citra hops right away and you get that pine, citrus you expect from an IPA and the malt you’d expect from a lager. This goes right through to the taste. It’s a little sweet like a lager from the malt, but finishes bitter like an IPA from the additional hops. This isn’t a hop bomb and it’s not going to blow your taste buds out of the water. What it is, though, is a nice session-able beer. You can have a couple of these and the 5% ABV and the 60 IBU are not going to knock you out of your boots.

I’ll still pick Yuengling Lager as my forever beer, but if someone happened to sneak in a six pack of IPL now and again, I’d be a happy girl. This is a great addition to the already nice line up of Yuengling beers.